PRECEDE
It has been 90 years this month since one of the biggest floods the region has seen caused major damage and heartache through the Kooweerup Swamp. Back in 1994, the Gazette interviewed several key witnesses to the carnage. Here is that report…
Win Ashby remembers looking down off Lone Pine Hill, near Garfield, onto a sea of water.
What was normally the green, fertile pastures of the Kooweerup Swamp was a great restless expanse of muddy water, only broken by the occasional treetop or roof.
The stories about the “super flood” of 1934 are many and varied. They differ in details – whether the water reached seven foot here, or 10 or 20 foot there – but all agree that it was the greatest disaster to hit the Kooweerup Swamp.
The sea of water seen by Win covered 100,000 acres (40,000 hectares). It ruined 10,000 acres of potatoes, drowned thousands of cattle, sheep horses and pigs and left hundreds homeless for weeks.
About the only thing it didn’t do was claim a human life.
This time 60 years ago (now 90 years) the stench in Kooweerup was unbelievable as unemployed men worked around the clock to make the town habitable again.
Huge graves were dug for the rotting carcasses of animals, mattresses were hoisted up onto hedges to dry and the great task of clearing away sand and silt was begun.
A very wet spring set the scene for the flood. Rainfall figures supplied by the late Frank Egan for Kooweerup show that in 1934, the township received 632 points of rain (160.5mm) in October and 649 points (165mm) in November.
“The ground was full,” Ken Huxtable recalled. “Whatever rain came couldn’t go into the ground.”
On 30 November well-known Kooweerup resident, historian David Mickle, recorded in his diary that heavy rain started early in the morning and continued all day with terrific gales.
“It is the wettest day and night that I have ever known,” he wrote.
However, it was not the rain at Kooweerup that was the problem, it was the water being dumped in the hills.
In the book From Swampland to Farmland by David Roberts, a table shows that on 30 November and 1 December Upper Beaconsfield received 7.30 inches of rain (184.5mm), Gembrook a massive 13.52 inches of rain (292.6mm), Jindivick 12.45 inches (316.1mm) and Kooweerup 6.7 inches (170.2mm).
“It all had to come down here,” Win Ashby said.
The water swept all before it, coming to Cora Lynn in the middle of the night. When he talked to Dave Roberts, the late Frank Egan recalled that he and his family were woken up around midnight by a neighbour.
“He was one block lower than us and got the flood first. Our house was just high enough to miss getting the water in. It went all over; there was water everywhere. You could see tops of houses sticking out.”
Win Ashby was teaching at the Iona State School and was evacuated, along with all the children, to Lone Pine Hill, just out of Garfield. The water was only six to eight inches (15-20cm) deep when they were taken out, but Win recalls waking up next to the bay window of the house where she was staying the next day and looking out at a sea of water.
“I had a friend who said she was lying in bed and when she woke up and put her hands out either side all she could feel was water.”
The next day Win rode a 17-hands high horse to see how her parents coped on the 11 Mile. The water came up to the stirrups but Win arrived safely. It was only when the flood waters receded the day after that she discovered that the horse had crossed a bridge under water that had only one plank left!
At Kooweerup, the men spent all night on 30 November and 1 December sandbagging the banks of the drains but about 6am the town was warned to prepare for a flood.
Full of beans at the age of 19, Bronwyn Broadbent remembers standing out the front of the family home early in the morning chatting with a girlfriend.
“This trickle of water came down the drain and we laughed at it, saying there’s the flood,” she recalled. “Little did I know I wasn’t to see my bed until 11.30pm that night – and in Elsternwick.”
Bronwyn’s father had a better idea of what was to come and enlisted her aid in the family shop to throw good up onto the counter as the floodwaters swirled around their ankles.
When the bank of the 11 Mile drain broke, the water hit Kooweerup in a rush about 8am.
“We got up and made preparations for an ordinary flood,” recorded Dave Mickle in his diary. “About 8am it came with a rush. Wally Buthune and family, Mr Grahan and daughter and ourselves took to the ceiling via a latter. It was five feet six inches around the house in 15 minutes.”
It was generally agreed that the flood in Kooweerup would not have been so disastrous if not for the railway line embankment. Although it contained a large number of bridges designed to allow water to flow underneath, the volume of water flowing down to Kooweerup was so great that it instead acted as a dam wall.
“If not for the railway line, the water would have run out to sea,” Bron Broadbent said.
“You couldn’t walk as fast as the cows were floating down,” Win added.
People camped on roofs, on the stage of the Kooweerup Hall, in the second floor of the hotel, and on the railway station, which was above the flood.
A relief train was sent to Kooweerup to take the people out of the town but refused to cross the Bunyip River bridge because of the fast-flowing water.
Bronwyn and many others crossed the bridge in a railway trolley and took the train to Dandenong, where they went to relatives or stayed at schools or scout halls.
“There was a baby born on the train,” Bronwyn said. “David Burton was born during the flood.”
Many were stuck in the roofs of houses until someone with a boat came to rescue them. Keith Davey must have given his folks a heart attack, as he snuck out of the family home and made his way to the Kooweerup Hall, where he crawled into the projector room. As a youngster, it was a great adventure.
His family was later rescued by Pomp Colvin, sitting in the house “on top of a bed, on top of a bed”. The water was so high that Pomp floated his boat right over the top of the home’s front paling fence.
Animals probably had the hardest time of all. A dead cow floated right into the Kooweerup Hall, where people were camping on the stage. Ken Huxtable recalls one gentleman who had a terrible time rescuing poultry, which kept trying to eat chaff floating on top of the water – and drowning as a result!
The king tide in Western Port Bay also compounded the problem, slowing down the water trying to make its way downstream.
Police cadets used rowboats normally for hire on the Yarra River to rescue people from roof tops.
By Sunday the only people left in town were the men. Women and children were not allowed back until the town was in reasonable shape, the following Thursday.
The government employed homeless men to help with the clean-up operation as soon as the floodwaters began to recede.
“The thing that impressed me was the sand,” Ken Huxtable said. “There was heaps of it.”
The smell is also well remembered. Many of the carcasses washed out to sea came back again when the tide turned. Several men were employed to burn the bodies on the beach with quicklime.
“The dirt and smell was beyond description,” Dave Mickle wrote. “Carcasses of animals were everywhere and horse teams with scoops made mass graves in the paddocks.”
The only beautiful part about the flood, according to Bronwyn Broadbent, was that most homes were left standing, “not like fire.”
Most people lost furniture and goods and it took a long time to put everything back in order, but at least their homes were still there.
Blankets, food and other relief items flooded into town.
“A lot of people must have donated cattle too,” Ken Huxtable recalled.
The town was without electricity for 11 days as Dave Mickle struggled to put the generators back in order. By Christmas, life was back to some semblance of normality.
A Royal Commission was later established to investigate the operations of the State Rivers and Water Supply Commission and was extremely critical of a few areas of operation in the Kooweerup Flood Protection District.
A large number of improvements to the drainage works were proposed and approved by independent assessment, but the main one, the spillway at Cora Lynn into the Yallock Outfall, wasn’t completed until 1962.
“The drainage is much better now that the Yallock Outfall has been done,” Ken Huxtable said. “I’m not saying it would never happen again, but if it did I think it would be of a lesser size.”
Although they caused terrible damage and heartache to the farmers on the swamp, the floods did leave the district with one great legacy.
“A certain resilience and tight-knit community spirit has grown amongst the people, some of whom were children or grandchildren of the original drain diggers, and like their predecessors they weren’t going to be beaten by the Kooweerup Swamp,” said David Roberts in his book.
“We all got in together,” said Bron Broadbent. “We do more to help ourselves.”
